This column has its share of harsh critics, and they hail from both ends of the stale “Left/Right” political spectrum. I am reliably accused of being on the payroll of both the Koch brothers and the so-called “gay agenda,” which I credit to a conscious commitment to human liberty that respects both personal finances and affections.

My reader email also includes extreme insults and suggestions: Actual examples include “low life parasite,” “end your life,” and so forth. These evaluations frequently fail to challenge the facts I present, yet nonetheless the authors (apparently) believe their scribbling will change my mind.

Well, this is their big day: I’ve changed my mind about something important!

But I’m not going to tell them what it is right now. I like to keep my heresies private until I really know what I’m talking about.

The bigger truth is I change my mind a lot. A person really isn’t thinking at all if they’re not - at any given time - uneasily mulling over two or three personal opinions they believe might need revising. The people I respect most in my personal and professional worlds all show this self-critical inclination. Many people are like this, but it’s also an unfortunately rare trait in those who speak most stridently in our political and social media disputes.

The 18-year-old me would have a lot to argue about with the 46-year-old version. When I started college I liked the death penalty, the War on Drugs, thought gays shouldn’t be in the military and that Henry Kissinger was a respectable foreign policy genius. I’ve thoughtfully changed my mind on all those items - and much else - and now think Kissinger should be hauled before a war crimes tribunal.

More recently, I was very pleased when candidate Ted Cruz eked out a win in the 2012 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas. I believed at the time this was a needed repudiation of the hypocritical big spending GOP establishment that made President Obama possible.

But as Sen. Cruz, he swiftly accused fellow Republicans of “"lining themselves up opposite of the American people,” merely because the other GOP senators wouldn’t go along with Cruz’s reckless plan last fall to force reforms to the Affordable Care Act by shutting the government down.

It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress who doesn’t believe the Affordable Care Act requires severe changes. And even Democrats, such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, were opening up to the idea of changing course. Cruz’s thoughtless decision to label as traitors those who merely disagreed with his strategy made him more of an impediment to ACA reform than an asset, and I said so in an October column.

The mainstream media’s Cult of Bipartisanship is severely overrated, unless one prefers one party states like Cuba. Often a correct public policy option is competing against a bad one, leaving literal compromise between them as just another mistake. The ideal virtue of our system should be robust debate, where one side wins by convincing the other on the merits of the case. But that virtue becomes vice if combatants argue in bad faith and just talk past each other with no willingness to consider having their own minds changed.

If you find yourself attacking someone’s motives, intellect or character, rather than their facts, it’s likely you haven’t thought to change your own mind on anything important in a very long time. If so, you’re probably losing your argument, and you just might have lost your mind as well.
Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan House and worked for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He has assisted in a start-up effort to encourage employers to provide economic education to employees, and is currently the director of policy for InformationStation.org. His employer is not responsible for what he says here, on Facebook, or Twitter ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.